You'd think this sort of stuff belonged to the past - but no. Apparently, Microsoft is afraid of Android on its Windows 8 tablets, because Intel has just announced that it will provide no support for Linux on its clover Trail processors. Supposedly, this chip is "designed for Windows 8". What?

Are you a software developer just selling services on top of only free software to both domestic and enterprise customers?

How do you pay your bills?

Open source is economically the best option for companies whose primary business is NOT to sell software. Any business whose products incorporate software, but the product itself is not the software per se, has a great business case to use open source.

If your business is to sell software, instead of services around it, which is not always possible, then the open source model does not work for a sustained business.

You have a gift for misconstruing what people say.

lemur2 was talking about companies that work with software, where software was not the product. Like Amazon, where they use software to provide a service. Or google, where they use software to provide a service. Or every other web-based business, where software is part of the business process, but isn't the thing sold to the user. For these people, working with open-source software vendors can make a lot of sense; they get a high-quality web server to build a site off of, or a high-quality operating system and platform to make a product out of (for example with Android and Valve's upcoming set-top), or a high-quality database system, or etc. And they get it for free, with free improvements from the community over time.

For these people, contributing to the health of the project can also make sense, as long as it allows them to keep getting otherwise free high-quality software (especially if the cost of the contribution is much less than the expense of hiring a team of software engineers to create an equivalent bit of software).